Category Archives: munin

With the recent (2009-12-23) update to
FreeBSD’s
sysutils/smartmontools portsmartctl
stopped working if run as non-root.
I did not investigate whether it is because of the change
in the way smartctl operates,
or whether it just stopped to be setuid root.

Normally I don’t mind going root to run smartctl by hand,
but it presents a bit of a problem for the hddtemp_smartctlMunin
plugin.

One possible solution is to add the munin user to the operator group,
add the following two lines to /etc/devfs.conf:

perm ata 0660
perm xpt0 0660

And finally, run sh /etc/rc.d/devfs restart.

Being the dummy that I am, I only thought about a simpler solution
when composing this post: just add user root into the [hddtemp_smartctl] section
of your munin/plugin-conf.d/plugins.conf file.
Besides being simpler, this method has an added advantage: an updated
version of the
sysutils/munin-node port
can easily incorporate this change.
Dag-Erling: hint, hint. :-)